Taken from Reddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sto/comments/mhkz45/ten_forward_weekly_31032021_legendary_d7/
Topic: Legendary D7
Guests: ship artist Donny Versiga and systems designer Jeremy Randall
- They initially thought about naming the legendary bundle just "legendary klingon bundle" instead of "klingon defence force", but apparently there was so many asks for clarification about klingon recruitment event and whether other races are eligible, so they decided to clarify.
- Jem'hadar's lvl 60 start confused a lot of new players; that's why Cryptic decided to block players that don't already have lvl 65 char from applying the level up boost.
- Boost should not auto-apply to character purchasing it.
- While talking about XP boost, Mike implied that there may be recruitment rerun "very soon" that players could use level boost for, so it seems to me that we're getting Delta rerun in the foreseeable future.
- Donny's first job was remastering the K't'inga.
- Kronos One legendary skin and Romulan D7 bonus skin were added because "if we're not doing it now, we'd never do it".
- Actually, romulan D7s never bore the bird in TOS, it was added in remaster.
- Mike wanted to repeat: upon unboxing the console it becomes account-accessible. Jeremy thinks it's unlocked even earlier, upon purchase.
- Kelvin and DIS visuals are not included because they're larger and don't fit on the same skeleton - just Constitutions.
- "Shall we not revenge" trait:
- Trait has no lockout time, so it's possible to have the 100% uptime of maximum stacks.
- Trait would be boosted by disruptor damage boosts, but isn't considered a weapon.
- Mike was unable to show it, but they tried to make trait have tame visuals - just small disruptor cannon shots firing back.
- Trait only activated upon activation of specific powers that are explicitly specified to it internally (and, apart from intel anes, those are only the ones that heal by default), rather than activating a trait upon receiving any heal.
- Stasis beam console:
- Stasis beam is inspired by the animated series, but implied to be modernized and no longer disables the ship firing it, merely one-time auxiliary drain.
- Console's passive is readiness buff for all 3 main specialisations.
- Slightly off-topic: they're working on cloaking bug for consoles, but the fact that it's not as prevalent on the PC hinders the process.
- Mike is not aware whether STO team is going to release official drop rates for lockboxes like Magic did.
- Mike tried to adapt a tutorial bridge to be usable as regular one, but quickly realized that it's a bigger task than he could handle.
- Statistics show that people aren't interested in purchasing bridges.
- Jeremy repeated that cross-faction flying was made so that they could make non-fed ships and still sell them to fed-only players.
- Jeremy said that that is working out "pretty well" so far.
- Even though they probably can, they're unwilling to unrestrict the bridges and allow such things as B'rel with defiant bridge.
- Janeway class coming to console "mid next month" - probably meaning april.
- Mike is not aware why the bundle was released not and not during the recruitment. His guess is financial concern about overlap with anniversary bundle.
- They're looking into "photo mode" for consoles.
- There'll be some "fun stuff" for 1st april. I'd assume that's besides the usual.
Comments
This does not instill me with much confidence.
"pretty well" sounds like sales of non-fed ships are up slightly, but this is probably due to KDF legendary hype.
It's obviously WAY too late to put the genie back in the bottle now, but:
IF they mad made it where doff assignments could only be started by visiting the different locations in your ship interior
AND
IF the doff assignments were actually rewarding enough to justify the above statement requirement,
Then ship interiors/bridges would actually be something people cared about spending money on, if they saw them all the time.
Again though, it's way too late to try that now. But hey, maybe in a future Trek MMO.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
On the contrary...
This appears to be saying that they know of the issue on both Console and PC, but it is more prevalent on the Console. Additionally, the fact that it is not as prevalent on the PC is hindering their efforts to track down what is causing the bug on either Console or PC.
Bugs always get fixed on PC first.
It was fun to do it that way a time or two back when doff missions did work that way back in 2012. After that it gets old fast to go to bridge - go to engineering deck - walk to main engineering - talk to chief engineer just to launch a doff mission. It's busy work not fun. It's something that at most should be in the game once as the steps to unlock being able to do those missions from the normal space menu.
Still, why does the bridge/interior have a load screen anyway? Load that into memory so I can just jump there instantly. Sure have a checkmark for people who only have 2 gigs of RAM, but a near instant transfer from space to bridge should be possible. That alone would make people more interested in visiting their bridge.
It's that way due how maps are handled in STO, as far as your game is concerned your bridge is just a regular ground map, so it's not just the map geo the game as to load but also the movement set for ground maps and your ground character. Also IIRC there's no separate bridges for each player but it's one map with each player being in their own phase (unless you're invited to someone else's bridge obviously).
That circle could be broken with a little thought into linking options, but the devs just don't seem to want to bother. I would buy the TOS bridge if it could be used across all my Fed ships for instance even though most bridge packs cost at least as much as a c-store T5 ship. In fact, one of my TOS captains' background story has it that she has the same ship she used before with a Daniels-supplied holographic disguise.
Linking the default bridge for the character's faction and any that have been bought to the cross-faction ships would be a big help too instead of everything having that horrible cast concrete low-res eyesore they use for them now. Something like that should be doable without too much trouble even if it means using the same dropdown they have for the oldstyle tiered ships in the ship tailor.
Space Barbie is the real endgame! Bring down ALL the walls on both tailors, ship and crew.
Also entirely possible that Ze Grand Poobah CBS hath decreed that no such thing shall be done.
Translation: CBS may have veto'd it. While Cryptic are the developers of the game, ultimate authority over what can and cannot be done in game falls to the IP holder.
IIRC there is no hard source for what CBS has and has not vetoed that would available to the public, though in this case I seem to recall that the devs said in this or last week's stream that they had not asked about that yet due to other things involving bridges. Like the fact they have to manually add each bridge to each ship (there was no code that could automatically do that when they said that).
Well those are about as hard as we can realistically get but if you believe that Cryptic is lying about everything and just not doing certain things to be evil.
Those people probably won't believe that something is vetoed until they see a official contract or e-mail saying that, even though obviously Cryptic cannot show us that. Those sources was what I was referring to then I said "no hard source that's available to the public". Since technically livestreams and interviews are second hand info, granted there's no realistic motive for Cryptic to lie here either.
Models, textures, geometry, none of that is changing unless you go to the shipyard and select a different bridge. Thus, it should able to be preloaded and sitting there in RAM waiting for the server to okay the map change.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
You didn't seem to get the "like a normal ground map" part, there's no separate "bridge" mode for maps. Also the way STO handles maps having a ground and space map loaded in the memory at same time has the potential to break a lot of things if it's done without a lot of recoding of things.
I understood it perfectly fine. That isn't relevant, as I could suggest the same thing for ground maps, preloading all the ground textures/models, etc. in the game into RAM. And if you really wanted to, and had enough RAM, you could put the whole game into RAM, via a RAM disk. They don't need to be in use, just ready to go, sitting there, copied into RAM. Its no different than having them on the hard drive (except its faster in RAM,) because stuff is copied right off the hard drive into RAM for normal use.
What you need is enough RAM for this to work, but the game, last I checked, only uses about 3 GB of ram currently. Still that is why you just have a checkbox or internal check to see how much RAM is available and whether you can actually get away with this.
And no it would not cause issues unless its coded really really weirdly. Having all the stuff ready to go for your bridge map is not the same as simultaneously running it with whatever space map you're on, because at no point should the game be asking for any of that information while you're in space, not until you want to go to the bridge should it actually ask for that info.
Doing it that way (without a probable massive recoding to treat the maps like virtual workspaces) were you download the bridge map in the background and only change it when changing ships might actually work to shorten the load screen considerably but it would probably still have the load screen. Something like a two to five second load screen would be a lot better than the wait we have now though.
Programs that can switch instantly are usually written quite differently from one that assumes that it is working with only one environment at a time. Seamless context switching looks simple on the surface but it can be a royal bite in the behind to do with legacy code.